Printer Friendly Under the Radar: What Made You Buy (And Eat) That?

Printer FriendlyUnder the Radar: What Made You Buy (and Eat) That?

Liebman, Bonnie
(interview with Deborah Cohen)

Nutrition Action Healthletter, Mar 1, 2016

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

"The food environment has become a tsunami," says Deborah Cohen, senior researcher at the RAND Corporation.
"It assaults us at every turn in ways we cannot ignore, stimulating us to feel hungry or at least think about eating."
Few people want to put on extra pounds or boost their risk of heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. So why can't we just turn away?
"We have a shockingly limited capacity to make thoughtful, mindful decisions about what we eat," says Cohen. "Instead, eating happens without our full awareness."
It's under the radar ... and companies take full advantage of that.

IN THE SUPERMARKET

Q: Are we fully aware of what makes us buy or eat the foods we do?
A: We think that our choices are thoughtful and deliberate, and that we know what we're doing. We think that what we eat is under our control, but it isn't. Much of what we do is automatic and done without much thought.

When you talk to people about their goals, no one wants to overeat or get chronic diseases. But it's just too difficult for most people to defend themselves against the ubiquitous cues that make us eat too much.
Some people can do it. But most people are overwhelmed with too many responsibilities. Most of us have a lot on our minds. It's too much effort to track everything. And it's a huge burden that people didn't have to face in the past.
Q: What influences us in the store?
A: The industry has all kinds of techniques to make us feel like we have to buy something right now or we'll lose out on an opportunity.
They may say that it's a time-limited special. Or they may suggest the quantity to buy by offering three items for the price of two, or 10 items for $10.
Those techniques encourage us to buy more, and when we buy more, we often end up consuming more.
Q: Do we buy more food in some areas of the store?
A: People pay more attention to food at the end of the aisles. When the industry discovered that, end-of-aisle real estate became more valuable.
It started in the '80s when supermarkets had an explosion in fees that companies pay to put their products in prime locations. The food at the end of the aisle may or may not be on sale. It's only there because manufacturers know that the location increases sales. But most people don't know that.
And, of course, food at eye level sells better than food on a high or low shelf.
Q: Does decision-making wear us down as we shop?
A: Yes. We have a limited thinking capacity, so as we use our brains more and more, our ability to think carefully and calculate and analyze is worn down. That's when we make quick decisions based on the superficial characteristics of foods.
At first, we may spend a long time figuring out what to buy, but after we're running out of time or we're too busy, or our brains are overloaded, we pick foods based on appearance or convenience.
Supermarkets take advantage of that decision fatigue by selling candy and chips at the cash register. That's one of their impulse marketing techniques.
Q: What's the evidence that we get worn down?
A: In one study, researchers randomly assigned people to memorize either a two-digit number or a seven-digit number, and then offered them either chocolate cake or fruit salad.

The group that had the seven-digit number was 50 percent more likely to choose the cake. Memorizing a bigger number exhausted their mental reserves, so they resorted to impulse.
Q: Does our self-control also get worn down?
A: Yes. In one study, everyone was told to skip a meal before an experiment. Two groups were told to wait in a room with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, chocolate candies, and radishes before being asked to solve a puzzle.
One of those groups was told to taste the radishes, but not the cookies or candies. The second group was told to taste the cookies and candies. A third group was asked to solve the puzzle without waiting in the room with the food.
The second and third groups worked on the puzzle for about 20 minutes. But the first group--which had to resist temptation--gave up after just eight minutes.
Q: They got tired?
A: Yes. Our self-control can fatigue just like a muscle. Researchers showed an emotional scene from the movie Terms of Endearment to women, and asked half of them to control their feelings during the scene.
Afterwards, the women who were told to suppress their emotions ate 55 percent more ice cream than the others. Decision-making, thinking, concentrating, and exerting self-control use up our mental energy.
Q: Can variety make us eat more?
A: Yes. One study gave one group of people a single type of pasta and another group three different shapes of pasta. The group with more variety ate more, even though all the pastas tasted the same. It doesn't have to be true variety. Just the appearance of variety makes us eat more.
Q: So we have five kinds of Oreos?
A: Yes. Just changing the name or flavors or shapes of things makes people think they're different. And that attracts us.
I'm not recommending a monotonous diet. That's boring. We need variety so that we can get different nutrients from different vegetables--broccoli, eggplant, kohlrabi, rutabagas, mushrooms--instead of just one type of vegetable. Five kinds of potato chips doesn't give us that variety.

EATING OUT

Q: What makes us eat more when we eat out?
A: Bigger servings. Restaurants typically serve us more calories than we can burn, and people are eating out more often. A recent Cochrane review examined 72 studies and concluded that if you serve people larger portions, they eat more. It's automatic.
We don't pay attention to how much we eat because we don't have to. We can eat while we talk to a dinner companion, watch TV, or drive. We eat the food that's in front of us. We're not counting spoonfuls. We don't notice the difference between the amount of food in a larger or smaller bowl.
Q: We don't rely on hunger or recall how much we've recently eaten?
A: Right. In one study, researchers gave people pizza for lunch and then offered them cookies at 3 p.m. Before they served the cookies, they asked half of the participants to write down their thoughts about the pizza. That group ate fewer cookies, probably because they remembered how much pizza they had eaten.
Q: How else do restaurants encourage us to eat more?
A: Combo meals. People like them because they look like a better value, and you may save some money compared to ordering items separately.
But people also order a combo meal because they have to make only one decision. If they didn't get a combo with a burger, fries, and Coke, they'd have to make three decisions.
One study found that if people had to order foods separately, in most cases they'd order only two of the three items in the combo. They'd skip either the fries or the soda and end up saving money and getting fewer calories.
Q: How do menus push us to buy certain foods?
A: Companies use eye-tracking equipment to see how people scan a page, so they know that where on the menu a dish appears influences what people choose.
For example, the upper right-hand corner is known as the "sweet spot." Newspapers put the big news in the upper right-hand corner of the front page because that's where people look first.
Or, menus might put an expensive item next to another dish that's even pricier, so the first item looks more reasonable.
Restaurants also know that people are more likely to choose things that are listed first or last in a section. And of course the foods that they highlight or put in boxes get noticed more and get chosen more.
Q: Do our dining companions influence how much we eat?
A: Some studies show that the more people you dine with, the more food you are likely to eat. That's partly because people tend to copy others. If your dinner companion is eating, then you'll eat, too. You might be finished, but if someone else picks up a roll or a french fry, you might do the same.
People are generally not aware of their mimicking behavior, but it's hard-wired. It has to do with socializing and fitting in.
Q: Which is good for survival?
A: Yes. It turns out that when we mimic other people, they like us more. In one study, when salespeople mimicked customers, the customers drank more of a sports drink. And when the salespeople showed the opposite body language of the customers, the customers drank less and had less positive feelings about the salespeople.
Q: Do we know we're mimics?
A: No. In one study, researchers showed people a video where the experimenter was either eating Goldfish or animal crackers. People had bowls of each in front of them, and they were more likely to choose the same item that the experimenter was eating ... without realizing it. We have no insight that we do that.
Q: Many of us remember when food wasn't sold everywhere, 24/7.
A: Yes. I'm 60, so I remember how things were before the obesity epidemic, which started around 1980. When I was in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in the late '70s, there were very few places to eat around campus. College students just had a dining hall. If you didn't get there between 5:30 and 7 p.m., you didn't get dinner that night.
Q: It's not like that anymore?
A: No. In 2008, I went back to Penn to visit. It was astounding. The university boasts 61 places to eat within walking distance and more than 90 food trucks and carts on or next to the campus.
Food used to be prohibited in the library. Now there is a cafe there and in some classroom buildings. Fast food outlets like Chick-fil-A, Subway, Jamba Juice, Starbucks, and Top This, a burger chain, are on the main path through campus.
Q: And not just on college campuses.
A: Right. When I was a kid, gas stations only sold gas. Now there is a convenience store in almost every one. Stores that have nothing to do with food now sell food. Who would think you could get sodas and candy and chips near the checkout at the hardware store?
Car washes never sold food in the '50s and '60s. Bookstores had no food. Now they have coffee shops. Even some women's lingerie and men's departments at Macy's sell candy at the cash register. Food is all over the place. And it's mostly processed, non-perishable food, which is usually the worst for our health.
Q: And it's hard to resist?
A: Yes, it's much harder for people to refuse food than to accept it. It takes an effort to say no, whereas yes is automatic.
Q: Why?
A: If we didn't feel hungry when we saw food, we wouldn't eat and we wouldn't have survived as a species. We don't have to learn to feel hungry. It's built in. If we haven't eaten for some time, our stomachs growl, we may start getting a headache or a little shaky. These built-in mechanisms make sure that we eat so we survive.
But now we don't rely on those mechanisms because food is everywhere. The smell or the sight of food can make us hungry. All these cues make us feel like it's time to eat.
Q: And we don't realize it?
A: Right. Our brains are wired so that something like food, especially if it's novel, gets us excited and creates a craving or desire to act. We may think that we're independent of our environment, but we're not. We see something, and we react to it, because our bodies fire up these neurohormones.
Have you ever reached for a food on the table and then thought, "What am I doing?" You didn't want to eat the food, but you just did it automatically.

ADVERTISING

Q: How do ads influence us?
A: They can use priming, for example. That's when something conjures up a memory that later influences you. So if an ad reminds you of something from your childhood, you might suddenly be interested in candy or other foods you liked when you were a child. That's because you were primed to think about your childhood.
Q: And we aren't aware of it?
A: No. It only works if we're not aware of it. Eye-tracking studies have found that people reading a magazine or looking at a website can't accurately recall the ads in the sidebars. Yet when asked to select items to buy from a list, people are more likely to choose items that were in the ads.
Q: Do ads with happy people make us more likely to buy?
A: Yes, and supermarkets and restaurants also take advantage of that. They encourage the staff to be friendly and smiling. It makes people less suspicious. When people are less cautious or careful, they may be less critical, so they buy more.
Q: How else do ads persuade us?
A: Some use classical conditioning techniques. The best-known example is Pavlov, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian physiologist who rang a bell every time he gave his dogs food. Eventually, the dogs would salivate when they heard the bell whether or not he gave them food.
That underlies a lot of the food industry's advertising. Ads use celebrities or athletes to promote a beverage. We associate that beverage with the celebrity, so the feelings you have for that celebrity, you now have for that beverage.
When Pepsi gave Beyonce a $50 million contract in 2013, the company hoped her fans would consider the soda as alluring as the singer. That's basically classical conditioning.

Deborah Cohen is a physician and senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. She is the author of A Big Fat Crisis: The Hidden Influences Behind the Obesity Epidemic--and How We Can End It (New York: Nation Books). Cohen has served on technical and advisory panels for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

COPYRIGHT 2016 Center for Science in the Public Interest
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.